Gasoline From Water? It Could Happen
Major effort under way in California to use sunlight to split water into fuel.
Feb. 16, 2011— -- A worldwide competition is under way to develop technology that will revolutionize the way we power everything. from our laptops to our cars, and the United States, at the moment, has a substantiive lead.
The goal is to produce fuels -- hydrogen, methane, maybe gasoline -- by vastly improving on the photosynthesis that provides the fuel for plants and algae and all sorts of living things to grow.
The end goal: Turning ordinary water into fuel by beating nature at its own game. To do that you need sunlight, water and various catalysts to produce different kinds of fuel. The catalysts will likely be unlike anything seen today.
"This isn't pie in the sky," said chemist Nathan Lewis of the California Institute of Technology, director of this country's ambitious effort to be the first to achieve that on a large scale. "We can do it."
A consortium of several California research institutions beat out 19 teams across the country to win the chance to do something no one has been able to do before. The resulting Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis includes the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory, and University of California campuses at Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Irvine and San Diego.
Congress awarded $22 million last September to start the project, but future funding is not certain.
If Lewis is right, the nation, and ultimately the world, will at last be able to free itself from the finite limitations of fossil fuels. That calls for a mini-Manhattan project, a no-holds-barred commitment to keep the United States at the forefront of the development of new and inexhaustible energy resources.
The embryonic program is expected to cost up to $122 million over the next five years, and it will eventually require the full-time commitment of up to 200 top scientists and engineers. Work is already underway on two buildings, one at Caltech and the other at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, where the research will be conducted. It has the full support of President Obama, who highlighted it during his State of the Union address.
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